I see life in shades of grey, now.  I feel things in shades of grey, too, although most people don’t really seem to understand that.  Nothing seems all that important any more, it’s not worth getting worked up about – either to cry or to be joyful.  Life’s one long struggle and then we die – what’s in that to be excited over?

I spend my time at work pushing paper from one end of my desk to the other.  Whenever I’m almost done with a pile, someone gives me a fresh batch to get on with.  I process it, and move it on.  Someone else will process it further, perhaps.  There is someone somewhere else in the building who’s processing other bits of paper which then get passed on to me.  I used to rather like this job, but it’s become a means to an end – I do what they tell me, they pay me, I buy food, I eat it, I stay alive to do what I’m told to for another day.  Big deal.  I leave work at 5 on the dot, and arrive at 9 precisely every morning.  It’s not like I have anything to rush home for, but there’s nothing to hang around here for, either.  I attend office parties, but I usually leave early.  It fills me with a sense of boredom to watch other people get drunk and photocopy their backsides.  Similarly, I don’t much care for office gossip.  Why would I care if Hannah from Sales was seen out with her boss the other night?  There might be some innocent explanation; there might not.  Either way, it doesn’t concern me much.  Nor yet does it bother me whether the carpet gets replaced or not.  It’s not yet so worn that people are tripping over it where it’s fraying, but it’s not brand new either.  It’s somewhere in the middle.  Just like me.

I don’t feel young and light enough any more to be excited and proactive about things.  On the other hand, I’m not old enough to be happy to sit and do nothing all evening, either.  I eat, I watch TV, I read the newspaper, I might listen to something on the radio, I go to bed neither early nor late.  If I go to bed early, I wake up in the middle of the night and don’t go back to sleep.  If I go to bed late, I find it hard to get up the next morning.  So I do neither.  An awful lot of my time seems to be dedicated to doing neither of two extremes now.  Maybe this is the beginning of middle age.  Maybe the next exciting thing to happen to me will be a mid-life crisis.  I will go from eating a fairly normal diet, and taking the stairs instead of the lift, to being an organic-natural vegetarian who drinks vegetable smoothies and goes for a three hour run every day.  I don’t think.  I sincerely doubt I will change radically at all.  I’ll become like Graham, who wears the same suit every day of the year, with a different plain-coloured tie, except for a Rudolph Reindeer one at the Christmas Party, except I’ll be wearing beige skirt-suits instead, with flashing Christmas tree earrings.  I think my lack of interest in my own life is fairly well-justified.  There’s not an awful lot in it that’s interesting.

There are moments, in the dead of night, when it terrifies me slightly to think that I probably have another thirty or forty years of this left in me, before I reach retirement and have to change a bit.  But, of course, I’m too grey to be especially worried.  I can cope with the years – it’s the days I have trouble with.  Thirty or forty years is a lot of days.  It’s a lot of holidays to be spent on my own.  A lot of evenings to sit through with nothing worth my attention on the television.  An awful lot of nights to be lying alone through.

Don’t tell me I could sort all of that alone-ness out.  I can’t, I haven’t the energy.  I have nothing interesting to contribute.  I would add nothing to anyone else’s life except another person.  I am too grey to be bothered with; men prefer someone with at least a sense of individuality and enthusiasm; a little bit of independence and individuality that can later be argued over – a liking for nights in with the girls, or something along those lines.  I can’t remember the last time I had a night in with “the girls”.  I’m not even sure who they are any more.  I imagine they drifted away.  I imagine I forgot to return their calls, when I was too happy to think ahead to when it would all be over.  It would be a familiar story.

I wish you would come home again.  I can’t even remember why you left – I’m sure it was unimportant, really.  I wish you missed me, too, like I miss you.  I hope you’re grey without me, just as I am without you.  I hope that you, too, are three parts dead.